Finding hope in ‘Salò’
A critical reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and a secret second film
Note from Kim, June 23, 2025: Due to a copyright strike from Studio Ghibli, the video is not currently available. Pat and I are trying to find a workaround so that the video can still exist in some form, but for now, the transcript will remain accessible here, and I’ll update this post if or when the video is available again.
Note from Kim, June 21, 2025: As a slight change of pace, this is the transcript to Pat’s video essay on “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” with additional writing from me on a secret second film. Also unlike last time, the video link doesn’t allow it to play within Substack, so if you’d like to watch the video, you can do so here. You don’t have to have seen either film to watch this video essay, though we discuss core plot elements of both, so forge ahead by your own decision. Until next time <3
A video essay bad idea by Pat Healy, with additional writing by Kimberly Rooney 高小荣
[Pat voiceover]
The 1981 film, Polyester, gives viewers a rare opportunity to smell shit. The film incorporates a scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” card that syncs certain scents with the film. The gimmick had been used before to make audiences smell some nice things like flowers or baked goods, but what John Waters understood is that what people really want is to smell something terrible. A technology like that can’t just be used for the nice things—like a car accident you can’t look away from, humans are more tempted by the seductive allure of the opportunity Polyester allows: to smell a fart from an ass. That is what cinema is all about.
Content warning for murder, rape, fascism, racism, nihilism, suicide, gun violence, pedophilia, sadism, coprophilia, homophobia, satanism, Italians
1. “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” takes place some time around 1944,
in the middle of both WWII and the Italian Civil War, in the Italian Social Republic, more colloquially referred to as the Republic of Salò. Italy has become a fascist puppet state for the Nazi’s, and Mussolini is ruling it while facing growing resistance from Italian Partisans and a diverse coalition of resistance groups, who were simultaneously fighting the Nazi Germans who invaded Italy and the Fascist Italians locally in power.
The fascists and their collaborators were at the peak of their power but not necessarily winning. The writing was on the wall that their power is fragile, this fascist Italy thing might not last forever. What do you do at the end of the world? You throw a party, indulge in what you yearn for one last time.
“Salò” is a famously bleak film. It’s a movie where we watch a group of fascists torture a group of teenagers until they lose any will to live, then murder them. There is no happy ending, but the ending isn’t really what I want to talk about. These teens eat shit most of the movie, sometimes figurative and often infamously literal. For a seeming eternity, they are beaten and humiliated.
I don't find myself pushed away by the more provocative images of this film, but I totally understand why other people are. It seems perfectly reasonable to not want to look at images of rape, of shit-eating, of bodily torture, but at the same time I think many people actually do feel a need to see such images. There's something viscerally seductive about these kinds of images and films that play around them, and I'll fully admit that at least on a personal level (for that reason I find myself really attracted to the films of Noe, Breillat, Haneke, early Waters, and Pasolini). Maybe I am just a weird little pervert, and maybe you'll claim to never have any similar desire, but I think to a point I wouldn’t believe you. I think we always find ourselves, at some point or another, inhabiting what “Salò” finds to be a sacred and deplorable role, of spectator. We all love to watch.
So there's a pornography-adjacent quality to “Salò” that I feel no need to defend, but what I do care to explain is its hope. I think many have held up the supposed hopelessness of this film, both in praise and condemnation. Here we have a film that adapts the depravity of de Sade’s 18th century “120 Days of Sodom” on top of a structure adapting Dante’s 12th century “Inferno,” situated within the historical political structure of 1940s Fascist Italy, with the foresight of 1970s increasingly-neoliberal-but-volatile Italy which has found itself as a place of proxy ideological conflict between the United States and Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Those are definitely four incredibly depressing temporalities to be balancing into your film, which I think begs the question of...why the fuck would a filmmaker do that?
A friend I watched this with had a natural question about a third of the way into the runtime: “How much of this is historical fact or fiction?” and I think that’s an incredible question. There were some very evil people in this area of Italy during the era depicted in the film, but as far as I know no one literally performed the actions depicted. Does that not make this a strangely dishonest film? Why make this particular kind of fantasy?
2. “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” takes place some time around 1789.
It is an unfinished pornographic story written by Marques de Sade. It’s the story of four wealthy libertines, cruel men seeking the peak of a sadistic hedonism, sadistic in a circular sense since this story is where we get the word sadism, “of Marques de Sade.” The men isolate themselves to a private estate with 12 collaborators, 10 servants, and 20 victims (or maybe 18 or 22, depending on how you count). In de Sade’s book, these men isolate themselves in the Black Forest away from the political realities of the time, while in Pasolini’s film the men isolate themselves embedded in the exact center of the political realities of the time, in Salò of the so-called Republic of Salò, the nickname of Fascist Italy.
The four men are identified by their societal roles. We have the president, representing the law, the bishop, representing the clergy, the magistrate, representing high finance, and the duke, representing nobility, somewhat of a leader of the four, if we had to choose one, most enthusiastic of the libertine’s philosophy. I think it’s probably worth decoupling the violence of these particular fictional men from the morals of libertinism itself, since like any philosophical novel its characters may be used to explore an ethics without actually being perfect practitioners of those ethics. Libertinism is a tradition focused on questioning the restraints of conventionally accepted moral boundaries in search of physical pleasures — these fictional men exist as boundary pushers, performing acts far outside anything remotely acceptable, exploring what they refer to as “passions” — allowing a reader to explore these passions through them, may that be for the purposes of ethical casuistry, taking hypotheticals to understand what the reader accepts or finds deplorable, or doing… whatever it is pornography does: bodily indulgence with a debatable impact on the reader at all.
De Sade’s book is pretty barebones in that it’s unfinished. We have a strong introduction, an outline, and details filled in sporadically, I suspect based on whatever de Sade found most worth personally indulging in. This outline gives us strong understandings of what these passions are and a kind of taxonomy: passions categorized as simple, complex, criminal, and murderous. This may surprise people considering certain reputations, but de Sade’s version of this taxonomy is far more violent than anything Pasolini is interested in exploring. De Sade includes sexual abuse of children in the “simple” passions, that being the most mild of his categories, so personally I don’t think there’s much to gain from going through a point by point list in this essay, though if you’re interested there’s a hell of a book you can read, or at least a wikipedia page to skim.
The structure of that taxonomy is, for the most part, not given by the libertines, but instead given to us through the storytellers, these four old sex workers who recall debaucherous orgies of decades past that they participated in, giving us a story within the story that ultimately is meant to inspire the libertines in their current debaucherous orgy.
I’m not very interested in libertine philosophy. Whatever scraps of benign liberation from moral restriction we might find valuable in libertine philosophy, like maybe questioning the idea that all sex needs to be procreative, exploring sexual behavior that goes against some religious norm, that’s all stuff we can scrape away from de Sade and imagine under more contemporary queer feminist lenses that embrace rather than ignore human rights.
What I am interested in is how de Sade views fiction. To de Sade, at least to his libertines, fiction is direct inspiration; they hear a story of violence and that triggers an attempt to re-create that violence, usually in their own, sloppier, impromptu way. Narrative isn’t quite a one-to-one monkey see monkey do, but is instead is a kind of monkey hear, monkey’s inspired to act upon monkey’s deep-seated pre-existing passionate drive. Narrative doesn’t change them, the libertines are largely completely static characters, they don’t develop, the narrative instead acts as provocation or, even milder, permission – it reveals what is already there because they see themselves in these stories. If you accept that role of fiction, I think it problematizes a lot of how we’ve collectively imagined de Sade’s work itself; this book has been banned for longer than it hasn’t, due to a fear that it is corrupting in influence. Where are people seeing themselves in the 120 days of Sodom?
3. Kiki’s Delivery Service is a 1989 Japanese Animated fantasy film
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It follows a young girl named Kiki who is a witch on the verge of independence. She’s going out on her own for the first time, hopping on a broom and flying out to find a new place to live and, most critically, work. She starts a “Witch Delivery Service” (that is a delivery service run by a witch, not a delivery service that delivers witches), happily succeeds doing the thing she seemingly was born to do, living the cliche of loving what she does for work and therefore never working a day of her life… until she gets burnt out. The strenuous work she’s doing eventually exhausts her body and alienates her from her friends and family – her depression keeps her from her friend Tombo, she loses the ability to talk to her dear cat, Jiji, and ultimately the ability to fly at all. Kiki has the equivalent of an artist’s block but for witch delivery people. That block isn’t solved until a convoluted situation puts Tombo in harm's way and Kiki can get on her broom to save him, restoring her ability and curing her depression.
Like many of Miyazaki’s great works, Kiki’s Delivery Service is about labor, specifically artistic labor, which I guess is what you get when a great anime artist has a background in economics and political science. Kiki’s struggle is kinda the struggle of any young member of the petit bourgeois looking to find passion in their work, but is more cleanly read as a young artist balancing artistic fulfillment and material independence. The thing that ultimately seems to save her is finding a purpose in her art, flying her broom not just to make money delivering treats but to save her friends, to do something good. It’s easier to see what that means for a witch flying a broom than it means for an artist making a film.
4. “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” takes place some time around 1975.
Pier Paolo Pasolini made it at the fringes of a politically volatile society — Italy was a venue of the Cold War, with both the U.S. and USSR meddling in its elections between a dominant Christian Democratic party and trailing Communist party. The ’70s saw this proxy conflict reach its peak with the “Years of Lead,” a campaign of both fascist and socialist terrorist attacks, the socialists typically kidnapping heads of state and killing a few cops and the fascists indiscriminately murdering civilians in mass public bombings. I’m sure plenty of political commentators would refer to this as “violence on both sides” and say the real villain is extremism…
At the level of identity, Pasolini was intrinsically embedded in this conflict. In a stack of identities often brought up at varying levels of publicity depending on the decade in his life, Pasolini was a gay communist atheist. That said, he was actually kicked out of the communist party for being gay. One may assume his atheism would manifest in a kind of resistance to religion that we associate with queer liberation, especially given the place of Christianity in Italian politics, but that was extremely not his vibe. Many of Pasolini’s other films are incredibly spiritual, with his The Gospel According to Matthew being praised by the Vatican itself, his work embodied a fascination in a sacred pre-industrial spirituality. Whatever box you imagine Pasolini in, he evades. He was a bizarre anomaly of a guy. Where does a guy like that see hope?
There’s little literal truth to the action of “Salò,” but I think there is emotional truth. How does one deal with the horrors of fascism in 1940s Italy? How does one depict that fascism? To many, you simply don't; to take the truth of the action and put it on film is to turn it into entertainment (or at least that's how a film would typically work, in commercial terms). To Pasolini, you heighten it, you introduce camp. If you want an audience to understand the strict bodily power fascists of state, religion, judiciary, and wealth have over their serfs, you have to depict bodily destruction in ultimate terms. Watch the proletariat, or maybe more accurately the subproletarian (put a pin in that), be raped, maimed, scalped, and made to eat shit. These bodily terms make up so much of “Salò” that I’m not sure I can earnestly say it contains many characters; it has maybe six characters and a couple dozen bodies that the film acts upon.
That function of the body is seemingly more cruel than the fascism of the ’40s. The circle of blood may seem appropriate of the ’40s fascists, but the consumption and sodomy that more clearly defines the cruelty of “Salò” has more in common with the fascism of the ’70s, with the help of some metaphor.
The circle of manias. This circle is where power is established, by violence but mostly not violence aimed at the victims themselves. The victims are made to watch the studs rape a daughter of one of the four libertines while the libertines laugh, they’re shown the corpse of an attempted escapee, and they’re forced to pretend to be dogs, crawling around naked on all fours.
The circle of shit. This is the coprophilia part, everyone eats shit. The victims are forced to eat it, but also the collaborators and libertines themselves also eat it, eating their own shit, happily.
The circle of blood. We end the cycle with a wedding, as all comedies require, and a final determination of who deserves to live and die. We see a chain of betrayals as victims fight for sympathies, and ultimately most of the victims are tortured to death in a final climactic courtyard scene, which the libertines take turns either perpetrating or observing as voyeur. Two male victims survive by becoming collaborators, joining the libertines’ small army of studs. Only one female victim survives because she exposes two of the other victims for being a lesbian couple. She is presumably the only one to return home. The film ends with two collaborators dancing, waltzing to a radio because their pianist can’t provide music on account of how she just killed herself for passively participating in the atrocities of the last hundred twenty days.
This is a film extremely invested in the body, mostly in an incredibly Foucault-ish sense, albeit it’s a film made prior to most of Foucault’s relevant works and comes to distinct conclusions, but it’s having a similar conversation. It’s a film about process, the process by which the subproletariat, the underclass lacking class consciousness, is taught to see no future for themselves through a process of observation (manias), consumption (shit), and discipline (blood). The libertines shape their world into one that’s highly structured, all people have their class: a hierarchy of victim, servant, storyteller, stud, collaborator, and master. They have a way they are meant to move through this world, activities that are meant to be natural to them at all levels of biological function.
The biopolitics of the film are less visible in the murder and kidnapping than they are in the shit. The consumption and sodomy function as a digestive bookend, a collapsing of typical human function under this new designed fascist way of being: you will eat shit and get your shit pushed in, and the difference between who gets to live and who dies is who accepts this as the new normal. I rarely want to know what artists think of their own work, but I find it incredibly interesting that to Pasolini himself, the eating of shit was a metaphor for processed foods, this industrialized foodstuff designed as the new normal, albeit it feels a little too RFK Jr. to accept that fully on his terms. I prefer a more culture industry oriented reading, the shit to me is commercial art as much as it is food. It’s your Marvel movie, your Mission Impossible, your live-action remake of a children’s cartoon; not to say those are bad things, you can check my letterboxd for praise of most of that stuff, just that they have a role in a societal structure meant to build hegemony, may that be in the interests of in this case the United States Military, or a corporation bent on rendering consumers trapped in perpetual childhood. To control the pattern of consumption is to control the people.
So what is resistance to that, how does the body engage in counter-power? There is one moment the body becomes subject rather than object in “Salò”: the death of Ezio, a result of that chain of betrayals in the circle of blood. One of the victims rats out another to the Bishop for a minor infraction, starting a chain of later victims exchanging information on other victims' infractions to weakly argue for their own safety. This chain ends with Ezio, who actually isn’t a victim but a collaborator, though secretly unwilling, and a man who has committed the crime of loving a Black woman who works as a servant at the compound, a crime that would have been tolerated had it been less consensual and done in the presence of the libertines.
When Ezio is discovered, rather than continue the chain by ratting out someone else, perpetuating the proletarian cannibalistic self-surveillance, he chooses to stand against the libertines, revealing himself to be a socialist with a salute. The moment is shocking, not only because it's at odds with the selfishness of the preceding actions, and not only because Ezio is supposedly a collaborator and not a victim (likely having been unwillingly drafted into the Italian military and remained quiet for his own safety), but shocking in being the only meaningful resistance the libertines see in the entire runtime of the film. The libertines are as shocked as the viewer, stuttering in their plan to discipline Ezio and, after that pause, ultimately awarding him the quickest and most painless death of the film. Where the other victims are simply bodies to the libertines, Ezio was something much more thought-provoking: a threat.
My fear with Ezio's death is that it's more self-flagellation than hopeful. Does Pasolini want to defeat fascists or does he mostly just want to die fighting? I can't personally tell from the scene, but I think it's clear that the fear the fascists have is of organized, worker-united resistance. Ezio has to die as soon as physically possible, else they risk that organizing. It paints an image of fascists that is, even at maximum bodily authority, depravity, and cruelty, exceptionally fragile. There will always be more of us than there are of them, making the challenge of the socialist body, even the singular naked body of Ezio, a threat to the status quo that fascist violence is meant to perpetuate.
Speaking of bodies… why are the men in this movie so hot? Pasolini was no stranger to sexually charged cinema at this point, having just completed his Trilogy of Life a few years earlier, with The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights, which all deploy sexuality in a way that is, for the most part, a source of joy. Sex is explored as a way of expressing transgression, specifically a sexual transgression. The bodily exploration extends to shit as a source of comedy, rather than cruelty. In casting, Pasolini had a real reputation in the men he casted for their particular twinkishness, “the Pasolinian boy,” and that actually extends to “Salò” in its casting of Franco Merli, who plays the role of the victim awarded the honor of having the “most beautiful buttocks” of all of the victims.
In “Salò,” sex isn’t literally sex in the way it was literally sex in the trilogy of life. Sex functions as a metaphor for power relations, as does shit. Except… how can art ever be that cleanly one thing? How can a film with this much sexuality not comment on literal sexuality? Especially if we’re pulling from de Sade, who was more interested in the pleasures experienced by the perpetrators than he was with the system of hegemony those perpetrators were creating, I think it stands to question what exactly the pleasure of these libertines is doing in the film.
“Salò” is a homerotic film, and that seems to be a problem. The libertines embody, under one limited lens, a kind of queerness. Their preference extends often to men and universally to sodomy, an “unnatural” kind of desire. Is it not deeply problematic to label fascism as homosexual? Is Pasolini not repeating the sins of The Night Porter of the year prior when he depicts a gay marriage, amid a Black Mass, in his circle of blood? What does the image of a gay nazi do? And what if those images are kinda hot?
The collaborators, the studs in particular, are a gay masculinist fever dream, just a few protein shakes and steroids away from a Tom of Finland painting. Interestingly, the leaders are not. Like they are definitely misogynists, often gay, politically aligned with the particular niche of the gay masculinists, but they’re weak. In physique, they’re less stud and more cialis commercial. They don’t dress militant, they dress civilian, well-kept and formal, though sometimes crossdressing.
They’re guys who were kinda like Pasolini, albeit evil fascist versions. Three of the four libertines are played by personal friends of Pasolini who had no notable acting experience. The guy who played the magistrate was a newspaper writer; the bishop sold clothes in Rome. These are some typical white collar guys, chosen for their academic disposition. Their queerness, at least by our standards (queerness is a socially situated term, their actions like sodomy and certain gender preferences are definitionally not queer in the world of “Salò” but are in our own) – their queerness does two things for me.
For one, it revokes a queer audience’s comfort in imagining themselves incompatible with fascism. The historical reality of gay Nazis is complicated, but they definitely did exist, LGBT people are not exclusively found as victims of facism, past and present. “The killer inside of you is the killer inside of me,” we are all capable of this evil.
For another, it allows a straight audience to more clearly see the construction of hegemony. We need the gay sex, the black mass wedding, the platters of shit because if the movie had simply fed you the white picket fence, husband, wife, white picket fence, 2-and-a-half children, and a McDonald’s Big Mac, etc., you might not have noticed that you’re eating shit.
5. Kiki’s Delivery Service takes place some time around 1950,
though not any 1950s our parents or grandparents may have experienced. Where “Salò” is overflowing with time, Kiki’s Delivery Service exists mostly outside of it. In this 1950s, WWI and WWII didn’t happen, the rise of fascism didn’t happen, “Salò” didn’t happen.
How is it that we all see ourselves in Kiki? Her story of overcoming burnout feels familiar to anyone who’s ever enjoyed their work but come to realize that that doesn’t mean it’s not work, but also no one has ever had a job like Kiki’s, no one lives like Kiki.
Her world is so uncomplicated. She moves to a new city and is immediately gifted a place to live. Her natural ability to do what she does for work is completely supernatural — no postal worker or amazon delivery truck driver can do what Kiki does, despite their jobs being technically very similar. Her joy is an exaggeration, a heightened version of what it could be to love your job, to have a job made for you.
Somehow we see ourselves in this heightened image of a laborer, or at least I personally do. The image of Kiki collapsing into her bed after a long day’s work repeats in my head every time I exhaust myself doing this kind of work, creative work that I enjoy doing… but it is work.
I don’t tend to see myself in the Kiki of the end of the film. The Kiki who bounces back better than ever, the Kiki who finds community, who finds purpose in centering her work in that community. I love the fantasy of that life for Kiki, but it feels so convenient to me, too impossible, too far from anything I’ve found for myself.
Part of me wonders if Miyazaki sees it as impossible, too, and maybe that’s why he placed Kiki outside of time. When I see Kiki bounce back in the end, I can’t help but imagine the next time she will inevitably burn out, the inevitable cycle of pain that is embedded in a world that extracts value from your body and destroys it in the process. But Kiki exists outside that cycle. Does it help us to see a way to that other world or does it trick us, fooling us into thinking we already live there and not here?
6. “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” takes place some time around 1321.
Dante Alighieri wrote it in exile, fleeing the Black Guelphs who had come to power, embedded in a political conflict concerning who exactly gets to rule in northern Italy. Dante writes himself taking a journey through hell to redeem himself, reunite with his lost love. That trip through hell is obviously much more memorable than the two parts that come after, so it’s the only part that makes its way into “Salò.”
Punishment to Dante is less revenge than it is simply upholding the agreement the sinner made when they chose to sin, a fulfillment of a promise made with oneself; I suppose whether or not you see that as distinct from “revenge” may speak to your own spiritual background. This is exactly why the punishment in question is always so poetic — greedy people have to roll heavy boulders representing their former wealth, wrath is punished by being stuck in a perpetual war, sodomites run in circles for reasons that might feel at home with readings of “Salò.”
Dante structured his understanding of the world around circles, shapes that trap us in infinity, infinite continuous poetic suffering. That allowed Dante the character to traverse, witness infinite suffering, recognize sin and reject it.
The scenes of “Salò” may seem, at first, less cleanly invested in Christian sin. At least, a film this obsessed with depicting sodomy must have a different understanding of the apparent sin of sodomy than Dante did. “Salò” also only has three circles, aligning not with Dante’s circles of hell but instead with his categories of sin: incontinence, violence, and fraud.
“Salò” gives us three circles of punishment: the circle of manias, the circle of shit, and the circle of blood. To structure that suffering in this way immortalizes it, makes it infinite, inevitable. It becomes something much larger than the four particular men leading it, it is a thing that always would have happened, and seemingly always has happened, always will. How can one escape this? Seemingly Dante can, the great poet Virgil can, maybe Pasolini can, but they’re the exception.
What does “Salò” do to its viewer? Fiction to de Sade was provocation, you see part of yourself in the fiction and it ignites you to be yourself. When you watch “Salò,” where do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the victims? I hope no, I think the film has sympathies for the victims, this metaphor for the subproletariat or lumpenproletariat if you wanna get German about it — but the film sees no path out for them. They have no power to resist, they lack the consciousness to do anything but either die or collaborate, two versions of accepting their fate. To see yourself in the victims is to wallow in despair in a way maybe fitting the film’s reputation.
Maybe you see yourself in the libertines. I think Pasolini plays with this given the mirroring of his own documented sexual interests with the libertines’ own, and certainly de Sade’s entire pornographic premise lies on this possibility. They are seemingly the protagonists of the film, the highest billed actors, easily offered the most characterization, but that characterization is decidedly inhuman. Their paraphillias are just a little too contradictory, a fascist of our own world would be much more invested in nationalism, much more invested in using the hegemonic form of the dominant religion rather than diverging from it. Though we may see real fascists in the image of the libertines, no fascist would ever see themself in that image, and the film clearly has no interest in framing itself for them.
What about the Virgil of this film, the great poets that are the old storytellers? That may be where we can see Pasolini — these women craft stories to provoke their audience and Pasolini crafts “Salò” to provoke his. Understanding Pasolini as filling the same role as these women requires we see these two layers of storytelling as doing two fundamentally different things: the women are trying to provoke some sadistic fascists, so who is Pasolini trying to provoke?
I think the answer to that is in Ezio. Ezio is not a loud and proud communist, he’s a distinctly quiet one. He didn’t choose to confront the fascists, he chose the quieter, seemingly safer option of unenthusiastic collaboration. His only real goal was to survive. He was complicit, until he couldn’t be. His death feels so especially tragic because it feels wasted. Prior to his death, the only resistance we see the libertines face is non-confrontational, it’s justifiably selfish attempts to run away, which the libertines don’t hide from the other victims, openly touting the runners’ corpses out as proof of consequences for desertion, but they hide Ezio’s death, they don’t make any example out of him. What would have happened if the libertines had faced Ezio’s resistance in the open? What if he had openly called upon his fellow collaborators to turn on the libertines? Even if he had been gunned down, he would have given the victims a martyr instead of a dead runner. What would his story have done?
If I had to guess, I’d assume Pasolini saw a lot of himself, and wrote a lot of himself, in Ezio. During WWII, Pasolini was in his twenties and, regrettably, a fascist sympathizer, though waning in his support over time. He was no stranger to the conflict, his brother died as a partisan, while his father was a colonel in the Italian military, a card-carrying fascist who was on the personal security detail of Benito Mussolini himself, having stopped at least one assassination attempt. The Italian Army was drafting, and here Pasolini is at war-fighting age; sure enough, he was drafted. For a brief time, prior to the Nazis establishing their puppet state in Italy, when Italy itself was at war on the side of the Axis powers, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a soldier for the Italian army. When Italy surrendered and Germany responded by invading Italy and forcing them to stay in the war, despite the fact Pasolini’s unit was captured by the Nazis, he fled and somehow successfully escaped. He had a number of close calls after that, as his family was hiding in rural Italy where forced enlistment was regular, but he never was forced to fight on behalf of the Republic of Salò itself. He came about as close to being in Ezio’s position as one could imagine, but by some luck he avoided it.
It’s so interesting to me that the thing that forces Ezio to reveal himself is love. More specifically, an earnest, straight, and interracial love. This is, in the libertine’s reality, the queerest expression of sexuality present in the film, thinking of “queer” again as a socially situated term. It is his queer desire that reveals him to be an enemy to fascism, really problematizing the role of queerness is in this narrative. To return to my thoughts about gay nazis in a circular sentence, I think it’d be a lot easier to be a gay nazi than a queer one.
So that’s where Pasolini may see himself, but Ezio is such a small character in this film I find it impossible to connect with the film through him. The lack of any clear protagonist instead points at an interesting alternative; when we watch “Salò,” we connect only with our own role as witness. We view “Salò” and we view ourselves viewing “Salò.” We watch a lot of other people watch, spectators of the storytellers’ stories, collaborators watching from the periphery, the libertines themselves watching from their throne. I think that core is arguably the most alienating thing about “Salò”; if you find yourself connecting with the victims, you’re experiencing the better part of two hours of absolute pain and dread; if you find yourself reflecting on the film, seeing yourself and seeing sight, you’re in for a more contemplative and rewarding watch.
In the world of “Salò,” there are, worst case scenario, two ways to witness fascism without embracing it. There is the path of Ezio, to stand defiantly but alone in solidarity with the oppressed and likely pay for it, as Pasolini himself likely did shortly after this film was made. Then there’s the path of the pianist, to go quietly under the radar until you come to realize that you can’t handle your own complicity.
We live inside that world of “Salò,” but unlike any of the characters of “Salò,” we have watched the 1975 film “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” we see the machine from the outside. We can understand that we are trapped in a machine built to manufacture consent for its own existence. Does that help us defeat it? Does that help us escape it? If there is no real way out, it’s fiction that only gives us permission to suffer. Watching “Salò” means watching ourselves, seeing your own suffering, which doesn’t make that suffering hurt less.
[Kim voiceover]
7. Kiki’s Delivery Service takes place sometime around 2020.
At the start of 2020, I was talking to someone who was surprised that Kiki’s Delivery Service was one of my favorite Studio Ghibli movies. I was equally surprised at his surprise, but he explained that the ending was so sad to him. Kiki goes through all that she does, and she still can’t talk to Jiji at the end. To him, this meant that her journey was incomplete, that she hadn’t restored herself completely, that, to some degree, she’d failed.
Though I disagree with his interpretation that she never speaks to Jiji again, I want to take that reading of the ending seriously. Despite the upbeat song, the montage of her smiling, supportive friends and family, and her optimistic letter to her parents, the film never resolves the structural antagonistic force that Kiki faces from the start. Though the contrivances of her world allow it to be softer and kinder than the harsh realities that most of us experience, Kiki still needs a job to pay for food. She still exchanges her labor for housing. We can imagine a world outside of time, a world with witches and talking cats and flying broomsticks, but we can’t imagine a world without capitalism.
This is, in part, simply a matter of the kinds of stories Hayao Miyazaki seems to be interested in telling. Towards that end, I want to offer another read on the uncomplicated nature of Kiki’s world: Kiki’s world needs to be uncomplicated because if it weren’t, it would be just another work plot about a shitty job, an overbearing or absent boss, a horrific coworker. When we strip those things away, it allows us to isolate the violence of capitalism in itself.
What does it mean to see ourselves in this young girl so worn down by her job that her body, her very spirit degrades? I think often of Kiki sitting in the dark in her attic room, sobbing as she tries to mend the broomstick she broke while clinging to the hope that she could still fly. But Kiki’s uncomplicated world also makes it vulnerable to uncomplicated solutions. What do we do when, unlike Kiki, we don’t have an artist friend with a cozy cabin in the woods where we can take a mental health day with no financial consequences?
Ursula’s advice at her cabin has always frustrated me, though it can be true in isolation. Ursula is an artist whom Kiki meets while on a delivery misadventure earlier in the movie. After Kiki loses the ability to fly, Ursula convinces her to spend some time at her cabin, where Kiki confides that
[Film clip:]
Kiki: “Without even thinking about it, I used to be able to fly. Now I’m trying to look inside myself to find out how I did it. But I just can’t figure it out.”
To which Ursula tells her simply: Stop forcing it.
[Film clip:]
Ursula: “Take long walks. Look at the scenery. Doze off at noon. Don’t even think about flying. And then, pretty soon you’ll be flying again.”
She then attributes her previous experience with creative burnout to a lack of self-knowledge.
[Film clip:]
Ursula: You see I hadn't figured out what or why I wanted to paint. I had to discover my own style. When you fly, you rely on what's inside of you, don't you?
Kiki: Uh-huh. We fly with our spirit.
Ursula: Trusting your spirit! Yes, yes! That's exactly what I'm talking about. That same spirit is what makes me paint...and makes your friend bake. But we each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki.
I’ve seen a lot of people who are inspired by this exchange, and I’ll admit that I’ve returned to it when I’ve felt alienated from my artistic practice. But there is a bleakness to her advice: that whatever solutions to capitalism exist, they stretch only as far as the individual can reach on their own. That whatever resistance to capitalism community offers, it serves primarily to bolster and reinvigorate the individual. That if we turn inwards enough, we will find the answers to our problems. So what do we do when, inevitably, this isn’t enough?
I’ve been unemployed, or at least underemployed, since August. As many people are quick to tell me, the job market is absolutely brutal, and it’s not a reflection of my own worth or abilities. I’ve filled my time beyond my part-time job and job hunting with writing projects—my Substack newsletter, this YouTube channel, an essay collection, a potential short story collection. But, a couple weeks ago, I spent almost the entirety of the afternoon and evening crying. I was so tired, so worn down by splitting my attention across so many projects and jobs, none of which make enough money to sustain me. For the next few days, I felt unable to produce anything creatively, and Ursula’s advice was no help. I know why I write. I love it. I can’t make sense of myself without it. And I am still burned out.
Individual rebellion is very in these days—anticonsumption, quiet quitting, self-care. To a degree, it makes sense. Capitalism feels so gargantuan, so entrenched, that it’s easy, or at least convenient, to feel that these small rebellions are better than nothing. But something else is happening in Kiki’s visit to Ursula’s cabin. When Ursula invites her, there’s no guarantee it will bring back Kiki’s ability to fly. In the end, it’s instrumental to Kiki’s recovery, but it would take an extremely uncharitable reading to suggest that, had Kiki never been able to fly again, Ursula would have withdrawn her kindness.
There’s a mechanical, dehumanizing logic to capitalism—we are machines that turn food, water, shelter, and rest into labor. The goal of the capitalist is simply to refine and optimize the amount of input that workers need to maximize our output. There is no room for love, except perhaps towards the end of motivating us to work more. There is certainly no room for the kind of love that Ursula offers. Though we don’t see it in Kiki’s Delivery Service, this is the kind of love that’s foundational to organizing meaningful resistance to capitalism. I love you, a fellow member of the underclass, because I understand the oppression we both experience, and because I believe that a better world is still possible through our collective action. Perhaps the saddest part of the ending is the most realistic—that the characters offer this love to one another, but they can still only see it through the lens of individual solutions.
To see yourself in Kiki is to see your body changed—perhaps irrevocably—by capitalism. But it is also to see love be offered to you without the expectation or demand of anything in return. Throughout the months that I’ve been unemployed and underemployed, my friends have loved me in ways that I didn’t know I needed until they were offered. To watch Kiki’s Delivery Service is to ask, Do we love each other because it is the means to the end—of recovering from burnout, of overthrowing capitalism and fascism, of talking to our beloved pet cat again? Or do we love each other because, well, what kind of world would it be if we didn’t?
[Pat voiceover]
8. “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” takes place some time around 2025.
I’m watching it as an American fascism continues to rise to power, distinct and somewhat pacified by its protestant hyper-individuality, but something on this screen resembles 2025’s sadistic white supremecist Christofascism, in image or in feeling.
We live in a political culture obsessed with punishment. Voting for Trump to own the libs, or from the left we wait to see conservatives have their livelihoods wrecked by insane tariff policies. We rarely get to play a role reminiscent of a sadistic collaborator, but we do watch, we are sadistic voyeurs. We prefer to experience nearly our entire political realities as spectators, waiting for someone to do something, waiting for something to happen.
Have you ever materially impacted your oppressor? If you zoom far enough out the answer’s almost definitely ‘no’ to the point the question is meaningless, but let’s take seriously how we imagine resistance. Maybe voting is something, I think it’s a waste of my energy to suggest voting is somehow bad, but it hasn’t been enough, it hasn’t worked.
Have you been boycotting? I have, but voting with my dollar feels bleak, much more bleak than even voting with my vote. If I stop eating shit on a plate served by Target in favor of a plate served by Costco, I am still eating shit.
How can we remember how to fight together? The systemic critique of “Salò” is that we live in fascism’s perfect machine, that being a machine built to keep us defined by our passive consumption. Aside from our insistence that active consumption must exist as praxis, whose collective action primarily consists of shaming our fellow consumers for consuming incorrectly, our capacity to even imagine politics as a collective phenomenon seems almost totally gone. The closest we’ve gotten recently, though mostly very benign, were the encampments, a collective and memetic kind of resistance, and that was terrifying, seemingly to both fascists and liberals. Even among people who by all accounts oppose fascism, even that particular militaristic genocidal fascism the United States is supporting Israel in perpetuating, a collective effort opposing it is nightmare fuel, a cause of potential instability, “extremism.”
It feels like if a new batch of concentration camps open up tomorrow, no partisans will come to liberate them. Instead, we’ll be busy arguing whether or not we should call them concentration camps, caught shaming Instagram models for buying toothpaste complicit in their construction, maybe loudly mourning what the world could have been like if Bernie had won. We’re in the world that “Salò” built, we can’t imagine beyond that, the closest we can get is acknowledging that we can’t imagine beyond it, watch ourselves fail and know exactly why.
I still believe that we can save each other, but I’m not
[end video]